I'm not sure that I'm wise, but I do feel old quite often. I noticed that after my talk at SQLSaturday #8 in Orlando, Devin Knight, brother of my business partner, Brian Knight, wrote a series entitled the Wise Old Man (#4 is linked in there). I was both amused, surprised, and a little flattered that I'd inspired someone else to write based on my talk. I wasn't sure how well it would be received, but apparently people liked it.

I think most of what I brought out in the talk was the same type of stuff that you see in many self help books. It's common sense, it's based on experience, but it's nothing earth shattering, just a little organized. If you saw the talk you might debate that, but I think I at least kept close to the slides :)

Common sense is just that, it's common knowledge and ideas that most people would think of. What I find often is that we're all busy, and we often focus on a problem tightly and don't necessarily know how to think outside our own box, or we forget to approach it from a common sense perspective. Instead we try to be clever, or assume we're not thinking it through if we don't come up with something new.

Building your brand online really isn't much different that how you might do it offline, but it is much more powerful. You have a huge reach online, and you can either use that to your advantage or ignore it at your peril.

Over the next few weeks I'll try and get more thoughts down on the talk and see if I can expand on it. I've been searching for a new book project, and this might be the one I tackle.

Steve Jones is the editor of SQLServerCentral.com and visits a wide variety of data related topics in his daily editorial. Steve has spent years working as a DBA and general purpose Windows administrator, primarily working with SQL Server since it was ported from Sybase in 1990. You can follow Steve on Twitter at twitter.com/way0utwest

Comments

Posted by knight_devin@hotmail.com on 10 November 2008

I think the organization was actually one of the best parts of the talk. It gave people steps on how they can get started on building their brand. It helped that you made it entertaining too.